Software Engineer (Tech Lead)
Company: Kobalt Labs
Location: New York City
Salary: $250k per year
Type: Full-time
Posted: 2026-09-15
About this role
About Kobalt Labs
Kobalt is the AI-native compliance operating system for financial institutions (FIs). Compliance is critical for FIs to get right, but most of their work still happens manually, in legacy technology or Excel.
Banks, credit unions, and fintechs across the country use Kobalt to run third party due diligence, screen marketing collateral, and stay current with the ever-changing regulatory landscape. Since our Series A, we've grown revenue more than 5x and work with some of the most notable names in financial services, including Chime, Upstart, and Affirm.
The Role
Engineers at Kobalt own products end-to-end, from understanding the customer problem and shaping the technical approach through building, shipping, and operating the solution in production.
As a Tech Lead, you'll own and drive a major area of Kobalt's product. You'll be responsible for its technical direction and execution, working closely with customers to deeply understand the problems we're solving, determine what we should build, make the architectural decisions behind it, and lead other engineers in getting it shipped.
This is a Staff+ level role, but a highly hands-on one. We're looking for exceptional engineers who want broad ownership and technical leadership while continuing to spend significant time building.
What You'll Do
- Own the technical direction and execution of a major Kobalt product module end-to-end.
- Develop a deep understanding of the customers, workflows, and problems within your product area and use that context to shape what we build.
- Turn ambiguous product and customer problems into technical strategy, architecture, and concrete execution plans.
- Lead complex projects spanning multiple engineers, making the technical decisions and tradeoffs necessary to ship quickly without sacrificing the foundations we'll need as we scale.
- Personally design and build critical parts of the product, from backend systems and data models to customer-facing ex...